Transporting baggage to and from the home or office to the airport is frequently one of the most cumbersome aspects of airline travel for business and pleasure travelers alike. Moreover, airline passengers carrying more than one small piece of luggage to the airport are often forced to wait in long lines to manually check their luggage with airline personnel. Typically, at check-in, an airline employee inputs the passenger's name or ticket number and the number of bags traveling with the passenger into a computer terminal. Tags are then generated and affixed to the baggage, which is then placed on a conveyor. Due to the time constraints associated with airline travel, this delay often forces passengers to hurry through the airport to board their flights on time, adding to an already stressful travel experience.
The inconvenience associated with checking baggage continues even after passengers disembark an aircraft in their destination city. Travelers must typically wait at baggage carousels for their baggage to appear, while the line outside of the airport for ground transportation steadily grows. Those unlucky passengers whose bags are unloaded last from the aircraft will unfortunately spend additional time waiting in line for ground transportation. In addition, airline delays and/or unavoidable scheduling may often force business travelers to carry their baggage directly from the airport to a business meeting because they do not have sufficient time to check in at their hotel.
The prior art includes baggage handling systems that are limited to intra-airport (or intra-terminal) baggage handling. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,793,639 to Yamazaki is directed to an intra-airport baggage receiving and handling method and system, with particular emphasis on the security aspects of baggage handling. Other prior art shipping services ship packages (e.g., a set of golf clubs) as freight separate from the passenger (i.e., the packages or baggage are not transported as checked baggage on a commercial airline flight with their passenger owner). Airlines will also typically deliver baggage to the home of a passenger when that baggage was temporarily lost or delayed during travel. None of these prior art systems, however, eliminates the need for travelers to carry their bags to the airport, wait in line to check their bags at the counter with airline personnel, with a skycap, or at an airport kiosk, retrieve their bags from an airport carousel, and carry their bags to a destination location.
While passenger convenience remains an important priority for air travel providers, the events of Sep. 11, 2001 have also raised public awareness of security issues surrounding air travel. Making our airways safe has become a priority of both the air travel industry and our federal government. One focus of this wide-ranging security effort has been on baggage screening and efforts to ensure that checked bags do not contain explosive devices. To this end, Congress has mandated that by Dec. 31, 2002, 100% of checked baggage at all United States airports must be electronically screened for explosives.
Critics of this mandate maintain that it will be impossible to achieve 100% baggage screening with currently-existing explosive detection system (EDS) facilities due to high false-positive screening rates and low throughput capability. They also suggest that the cost for installing a sufficient number of EDS machines to satisfy the mandate would exceed current budget estimates. They therefore recommend that Congress relax the mandate and push the deadline for 100% baggage screening to 2004. This would allow time to procure and install additional EDS machines and to realize improvements in EDS technology. Such a delay in implementing the mandate, however, will obviously adversely affect air travel security.